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Topic: NaNoWriMo (Read 9110 times)

I was going to ask if Teatime was doing NaNoWriMo again this year, then I read her blog which was rather indecisive. No No No No... Maybe. So I guess we will have to wait and see.

Once again, I will not be doing it. I have another month or two worth of editing on the current project and can't see justifying putting it aside.

Does Falling Whale participate in NaNoWriMo? Is she adequately recovered from moving? I remember a disastrous time for my writing when I moved four times in five years. That would not have been a problem when I was single, but moving after accumulating children and all the junk that goes along with having a family... Needless to say, I wrote almost nothing worthwhile for that 5 year stretch.

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"That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it." - Zaphod Beeblebrox

On very rare occasions, if I happen to have acquired a pound of inspiration, I can manage to complete a one-page short story or the like within a month, but a novel is quite out of the question for me in such a short amount of time.

I was never previously aware of any video game competitions similar to NaNoWriMo, but I have actually become aware of one recently. If I were to finish the game I'm currently working on in time, I think it would be submissible, but again I quite doubt that I will make the deadline. (I actually have no idea when the deadline is, but I still think it's a fair enough assumption.)

Game design is something that I could not ever stop myself from constantly doing, at least in terms of ideas, but, although they do advertise about college programs for game design, what it comes down to is the fact that there is no job that allows you to merely sit around thinking of cool ideas and then forcing people to make them into video games--you have to actually help produce them somehow, whether it's programming, graphic design, or perhaps music or something. And while I do program with Game Maker on my own time, I could never program with deadlines. It's hard enough to finish anything in time for dinner at Milliways, much less beforehand. Whenever I go through this thought path, the conclusion is this: what I would probably be best at is writing dialogue for video games that have a lot of it. However, despite there being many such games, I myself do not ever recall actually seeing a writing credit at the end of a game, so I'm not quite sure if "video game dialogue writer" is a real job either--the stories must come from somewhere, but maybe everyone who programs and graphic designs and stuff is full of ideas just like me, so they don't need separate writers. I'm not sure.

Hmm, that was longer than I intended. Anyway, my cousin is currently taking a college course that basically requires him to write a novel in order to pass, so, I'm not sure if he'll have it done for NaNoWriMo, but he has (to my knowledge) more or less met his deadlines so far. So that's interesting.

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". . . We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. . . . So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I'm talking about."

Yep Falling Whale and I both kind of got sucked into NaNo. I'm not going for the full 50K, though. Just finishing up the rough draft of my work in progress.

Wow, to write a novel to pass a class. That's something. Does it need to be fully edited and ready for publication? In NaNo you basically have a very rough draft. It's only a month and most of us are doing other things during November- jobs, kids, writing blog posts about NaNo.

As far as I can tell, it seems like he's supposed to write ten new pages a week, and when he turns them in, he and the professor have a discussion about any editing that could be made, but I'm not sure if he's graded on the editing.

I suppose I should try to write something. At least a page. I'll have to think of an idea though.

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". . . We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. . . . So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I'm talking about."

I have ideas, but I never make it to mid-story. I get stuck before I even start writing. Not only do I get hung up on details that don't matter, but the details that don't matter are the entirety of the idea. I still tend to like all my ideas, though, and I keep trying to retool them every few years. It usually doesn't work.

It seems like if I actually finish something, it's a random idea that I have, that I don't really even like, but somehow I start writing immediately and just finish the whole thing, and then it turns out to be better than the ideas that I like. And also finished. But I never know when those will come around.

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". . . We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. . . . So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I'm talking about."

Lewot, you might like the podcast Writing Excuses. http://www.writingexcuses.com/Since Falling Whale told me about it, I've been listening to all of the old episodes and I'm hooked. It's helped me solve lots of little and big problems. And a lot of the episodes are funny too. They're only about 15 minutes long each.

I actually had that quote as my signature at a forum that my high school English teacher made for his class.

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". . . We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. . . . So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I'm talking about."

Before you get too excited by this post, no, I don't have a novel for you. My cousin, who happens to be in Japan at the moment, is working on one for NaNoWriMo, and it's very good, but he probably won't want me posting it since he'll probably want to publish it. At any rate, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I did write a little something. It's quite short and probably too focused on unimportant things, but it's something.

How should I post it... well, I guess I'll just link to a PDF here (haha, 42.2 KB ).

« Last Edit: November 19, 2013, 01:42:24 PM by Grate Oracle Lewot »

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". . . We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. . . . So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I'm talking about."